Dodgers Score Again, Earth Shrugs: How Nine Innings in Chavez Ravine Became a Global Barometer of Apocalypse Fatigue By “World-Weary” Wu, Senior Correspondent LOS ANGELES—Another night, another crooked number on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard. The boys in blue hung a 7-spot on whoever the poor saps from the Midwest were this time—details blur when you’ve…
Mariners Score: One Run, Nine Innings, and the Entire Planet Holding Its Breath By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent SEATTLE, EARTH—Somewhere between the Boeing fuselage graveyard and the world’s last functional espresso machine, the Seattle Mariners eked out a 3-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays last night. The box score reads like a haiku: three…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Sweden: A Nation So Pleasant It Hurts By Dave’s Locker International Desk (and a lukewarm cup of overpriced filter coffee) STOCKHOLM—Somewhere between the 14th-century cobblestones and the 5G antenna disguised as a birch tree, Sweden has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. To American progressives, it’s a pastel-coloured…
Retirement Planning: The World’s Most Expensive Waiting Room By Our Correspondent, presently in one of those “wellness” cafés that charge extra for existential dread ZURICH—On the polished parquet of Credit Suisse’s flagship branch, a septuagenarian in Loro Piana loafers is asking whether his 3-million-franc nest egg will still cover a flat white when he turns…
A Social Security Bill, by Any Other Name, Still Smells Like Desperation Geneva—Across the fluorescent-lit conference rooms of the International Labour Organization, the phrase “social security bill” is being whispered with the same reverence once reserved for the Ark of the Covenant and, more recently, for Beyoncé tickets. Delegates from 187 countries have gathered to…
Interest Rates: The Global Game of Financial Whack-a-Mole By Our Man in the Currency Bunker, somewhere between Frankfurt and FOMO Somewhere on a Bloomberg terminal, a red arrow blinks like a tiny, strobing heart attack. That, dear reader, is the world’s pulse today—set by a committee of twelve serious people in Washington who decide how…
France: The World’s Most Glamorous Patient in Relapse By “Correspondent X” (still wearing yesterday’s cologne) Paris—If nations were dinner guests, France would arrive fashionably late, ignore the dress code, and somehow make the entire table talk about her. Once again, the hexagon is convulsing—this time over pension reform, police violence, and the charmingly medieval habit…
PARIS—From the banks of the Seine, the French government is once again demonstrating its uncanny knack for turning political theater into high art—think Molière with spreadsheets, or Racine rewritten by accountants who’ve read too much Kafka. While the rest of the planet debates whether democracy is dying of natural causes or being actively smothered with…
Weather Bristol: How a Drizzly English Backwater Became the Planet’s Atmospheric Punchline By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still drying off in Gate 43 Let us begin with the obvious: the weather in Bristol, population 465,000 and shrinking faster than British diplomatic credibility, is not, in itself, interesting. It is grey, damp, and insistently mediocre—like a LinkedIn…
**The World’s Most Dangerous Reality Show: Ukraine’s Geopolitical Theater** Two years into Europe’s most unnecessary war since someone decided the Habsburgs needed a slight nudge in 1914, Ukraine has become the planet’s most depressing reality television series—except the contestants can’t vote themselves off the island, and the producers are nuclear powers with questionable impulse control….
Lego Star Trek: When the Final Frontier Gets Bricked and the World Holds Its Breath Geneva—In a dimly lit side hall of the Palais des Nations, delegates from 193 countries have spent the week arguing over sanctions, carbon credits, and the precise shade of diplomatic taupe that should color next year’s briefing folders. Yet every…
